Photos: Celebrities who started off on reality shows
The genre has produced some big names we’d rather forget. But it has also been a stepping-stone and discovery platform for great talent. Here are some breakout stars.
Harry Styles. He got a start in music by auditioning as a solo contestant on the British music competition series The X Factor in 2010.(Wikimedia Commons)
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Ariana DeBose. She started out on So You Think You Can Dance in 2009, went on to have a Broadway career and won the best supporting actress Oscar for West Side Story in 2022.(Wikimedia Commons)
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Christian Siriano. He won Project Runway in 2007 and launched his own label. The brand was worth $5 million by 2012. He has dressed dignitaries such as Michelle Obama and put Billy Porter in a tuxedo gown for the 2019 Oscars. (Wikimedia Commons)
Kelly Clarkson. She won the first season of American Idol in 2002, and bagged a record deal with RCA. Her second studio album, Breakaway, sold over 12 million copies worldwide and won two Grammy Awards.(Wikimedia Commons)
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Cardi B. Cardi joined the cast of Love & Hip Hop: New York in 2015—just two years before her hit song Bodak Yellow.(Wikimedia Commons)
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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
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Calcutta Houses was initially an Instagram page run by Manish Golder, Sidhartha Hajra and Sayan Dutta. They scoured the city and archived heritage homes, some dating to the early 1800s, others as recent as the Art Deco trend of the 1960s, many that would not be around much longer. Last year they got their first request to document in details a family home that they had featured on their page. Golder has now been commissioned to archive a 200-year-old ancestral home called Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home; seen here).
